Friday, 18 September 2015

"Dartmoor Killing" (Guardian 18/09/15)

Peter Nicholson’s
low-budget horror-thriller starts rather better than it ends. As two young
hikers (Gemma-Leah Devereux and Rebecca Night) are led off the beaten track by
a hunky guide (Callum Blue), the first act’s every set-up benefits from the
screen-filling backdrops of the eponymous Moors. It’s disappointing, then, that
Nicholson should thereafter retreat from this most spectacular stage to a
farmhouse haunted by mysterious deaths; doubly so when the relationships,
dialogue and eventually action all stop ringing true. Redact the gore, and it’d
make an attractive promo for Dartmoor Tourism, but 2012’s A Night in the Woods hounded its characters far more persuasively
over this particular terrain.

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About Me

Mike was born in Warwickshire in 1978. He has written on film for The Scotsman since 2002, for The Telegraph since 2003, for The Guardian since 2012, and for the Reader's Digest since 2016. In the intervening years, he has appeared on Radio 4's "Today" programme and - with a degree of randomness befitting the man - BBC2's "Working Lunch". He has also contributed to the home-viewing reference guide "The DVD Stack" (Canongate, 2006; second edition 2007) and Halliwell's "The Movies That Matter" (HarperCollins, 2008).